Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,603 posts.

Startups
Any year
271

Startups Are Hard

Contrary to popular belief, there are no clouds of money that float around Silicon Valley and rain on anyone that utters the phrase, "I'm a founder!" Unfortunately, starting a company and raising money is just as hard as ever; it's just that the investors don't have as much leverage as they used to, but they still…

282

An update on YC China

In the summer of 2018, Qi Lu joined [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/] Y Combinator to help create YC China, a localized version of our U.S. program. As we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership [https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-for-president/]. With this, our strategy…

285

Advice for First Time Founders

We operate a platform called Bookface for YC founders to connect with each other, ask questions, find intros, and share advice. Recently on Bookface Zach Dixon [https://twitter.com/zachdixongg], cofounder of the gaming company Players’ Lounge [https://playerslounge.co/] (W18), asked a great question: 1. What are some…

296

Why to start a startup in a bad economy (2008)

October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either…

299

We bootstrapped to $11M in ARR

This year Thinkst Canary crossed the line to $11M in ARR. That number is reasonably significant in the startup world, where Lemkin refers to it as “initial scale”. For us; it’s a happy reminder of Canary's spread into the market. $11M ARR certainly isn’t our end goal, but it provides the fuel for us to…